Letter from Patti, a parent in Park City, May 2012:
Went to a district meeting this week up here in Park City touting the wonders of the Common Core math which we have been experiencing all year.
In a room full of angry parents, they explained in an attempt to get us to cut them some slack, that the reason the kids really didn’t learn anything this year and only did a repeat of material they already learned (ie: my daughter did 5th grade level math in 8th grade all year) was because the teachers really have not learned yet how to teach this new way of teaching math, and they still do not have any textbooks. But they hope to have some online textbooks by next year.
When asked why on earth they would start this when they clearly were not ready, the presenter said it was because the kids now in 9th grade need to be able to pass some test at the end of 11th grade so they wanted them to be ready. When asked why are we so concerned about the tests and not having the proper curriculum to be teaching off of, she totally slipped up and said, “because this is how the FEDERAL GOV’T wants us to implement it. She practically gasped once it was out of her mouth as if to try and suck the words back in from out of the air and quickly corrected herself saying, “well not the gov’t but the state lead consortium.”
Good thing I had my kids in the parking lot during the meeting putting flyers on windshields directing them to the Utahn’s against CC website. 
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They showed an example of some of the 6th grade math. What a joke. “Let’s say you’re going to divide a fraction into another fraction. Well before we can do that we need to get the students thinking “deeper”. Why would you need to divide a fraction? And what exactly is division? Why is division a necessary thing to know/learn. Once we know the kids understand the deeper meaning of what it is they are going to be doing, then we can proceed in teaching them” WHAT!!!!!!!?????????? They told us that the kids would be interacting with eachother more to “find the deeper meaning of things” and the teachers would be interacting less with the students and they would be using less material. WHAT!!!!??????
The sad thing is, the email about the meeting went out to parents of 5 schools, there were only about 30 people in attendance.
I plan to hand out flyers to the parents at the elementary schools in the pick-up line. These people need to wake up.
Patti
